SPOLETO BUZZ BLOG

Who’d a thunk it? Despite being plagued by downpours and damp days throughout most of its length, the last-minute cancellation of jazz series headliner Shirley Horne’s concert, and a main theatre production so unpopular that box office administrators began discounting tickets for it as early as the festival’s opening weekend … Spoleto Festival USA managed to break yet another box office record — making this the third year in a row they’ve beaten the previous year’s sales. Total box office reciepts this year came in at $2.532 million: $2,000 more than 2005’s box office, but an improvement no less, particularly considering the weather and other programming factors that had many speculating sales would nosedive for this year. It’s nice to see the cynics were proved wrong.

Three weeks ago, Charleston was a different place. Having been through 28 previous festivals, we had a general idea what to expect from the combined effect of 120-plus Spoleto performances, more than 700 Piccolo events and exhibits, and the thousands of attendant artists, technicians, stagehands, administrators, staff members, interns and apprentices, tourists, and audience members that make it all happen. But every one is different; each 17-day run in May and June is an entirely unknown quantity until it’s upon us, which is exactly the way Spoleto founder Gian Carlo Menotti, and current general director Nigel Redden, like it.

Menotti chose Charleston as the site of a United States counterpart to his long-running Spoleto Festival in Spoleto, Italy, because of its old-world European charm, its walkability, its intimate size, and the number of excellent performance venues within close proximity to one another. Redden has said often that Spoleto Festival USA is specifically engineered toward completely taking over the city of Charleston for two and a half weeks each spring: a longer festival would dilute the impact of the event, as would a larger city. The two entities — Charleston and Spoleto — are built for each other.

Having just spent the last three publication cycles of the City Paper out on the streets, taking in some 63 total performances and soaking in the atmosphere of a city in thrall to the performing and visual arts, I can say that Mennoti’s and Redden’s vision remains as real, and as effective, as it’s ever been.

This year’s Spoleto festival included three U.S. premieres, the world premiere of a new orchestral work, and two jazz artists’ American debuts. It saw the return, for the third time in as many years, of Chinese music theatre to the festival. It also marked the first ever presentation of an opera (albeit in concert form) for Piccolo Spoleto, the first festival whose Opening Ceremony didn’t take place at City Hall, and the first Spoleto Festival ever without critic Robert T. Jones. This was a Mozart-heavy festival (a Spoleto opera, a Piccolo opera, two Intermezzi concerts, a film, and at least two Chamber Music concerts) — and next year is likely to be even heavier, with 2006 being Mozart’s 250th birthday. It was also one of the rainiest festivals on record, though the weather dried out just in time to provide a perfect finale setting at Middleton Place.

Spoleto produces all its own operas, and this year settled for no less than three of the budget-busting productions. They included a $503,000 Don Giovanni that completely transformed the abandoned Memminger Auditorium into a rolling hillside dotted with cherry trees in spring, summer, and autumn foliage, a pair of water-filled pools, an enormous, crumbling head fallen from an unseen statue (it was Michaelangelo’s “David,” FYI), and a seating arrangement that eliminated all the previous chairs in favor of three clusters of stadium-style seating in the corners and along the sides of the stage. Featuring an avant-garde staging that included both traditional elements and some very modern touches (period costumes, Polaroid cameras, KFC), the opera was sold out long before it opened, and was such a success that Spoleto quickly announced plans to preserve the set in the Memminger until next spring and present the work again for Spoleto 2006.

The festival’s second biggest operatic success — and one of its most popular productions this year — was director and puppeteer Basil Twist’s extraordinary take on Ottorino Respighi’s La bella dormente nel bosco (“Sleeping Beauty in the Woods”). Twist’s puppets, nearly all of them life-sized, made the classic tale a work of magic, with the singers standing to one side while audiences watched the puppeteers operate the remarkable creations on the Dock Street Theatre stage. La bella was one of the most talked-about of this festival’s events, selling out all but a couple of its six shows. (Twist’s opera will go up again later this summer at New York’s Lincoln Center Festival.)

On the opposite side of the most-talked-about spectrum lies Die Vögel, Walter Braunfels’ almost forgotten German opera based on Aristophanes’ play The Birds, at the Sottile. Die Vögel was positioned to be the biggest of the operatic trio, and those who saw it had superb things to say about the colorful U.S. premiere, which featured outlandish costuming, a beautifully lush score, oddly twitching performances by the singers, and a giant tree whose branches catch fire at the opera’s end. But with only four performances, just one of which took place in the festival’s first week, Die Vögel was overwhelmed by the spectacle and the chatter surrounding Don Giovanni and the festival’s other most talked about event: Mabou Mines DollHouse.

Director Lee Breuer’s avant-garde adaptation of Ibsen’s classic A Doll’s House polarized critics and audiences from the start, with its melodramatic piano accompaniment, its length (initially three hours), some risqué staging choices (e.g. simulated fellatio, nudity) and most of all Breuer’s choice to cast the male characters with actors who are all just four feet tall and women who stand nearly six feet. But more than the play itself, Breuer generated constant chatter around his many alterations to the play throughout its 17-performance run, and his regular comments to and about the press, which included a Conversations With program in which he blasted Post and Courier overview critic Blair Tindall for her negative review of the play, calling her ignorant, unqualified, “matronizing,” a “fake critic,” and unversed in the history of avant-garde theatre. Now that’s what I call theatre.

Kingdom of Desire, the adaptation of Macbeth by China’s Contemporary Legend Theatre in the Peking Opera style, was well received, even with a mere two performances at the Gaillard, though it would probably have been a better fit (in both a production and an audience sense) at the Sottile Theatre. If Spoleto continues to program Chinese opera, there’s every indication that Charleston audiences will continue to reward them.

Spoleto filled out its theatre offerings this year with a new series of one-person offerings it called Solo Turns. The three plays were big hits with audiences and critics, and they encompassed a range of styles. Mike Daisey’s The Ugly American was a monologue in the Spalding Gray vein about a few months spent studying theatre abroad in London. Waifish Hazelle Goodman channelled a dozen disparate characters in her funny and thoughtful commentary on pop culture On Edge. And S.C. native Heather Grayson’s After the Storm proved a provocative, highly theatrical account of her real experiences in the U.S. Army during the first Gulf War.

“Provocative” is not exactly what the Colla Marionettes were aiming for with their third appearance at Spoleto, but audiences were more than happy to settle for the three charming tales told in the company’s two programs. With Petruschka, Sheherazade, and Guerrino the Unfortunate, the Colla family once again proved why they’ve been one of the world’s greatest masters of marionette theatre for almost 200 years.

Netherlands-based dance collaborators Emio Greco | PC thrilled and freaked out audiences at the Sottile with that company’s provocative 90-minute work Rimasto Orfano. The twitching, trembling, spastic body language in Greco’s choreography, combined with Michael Gordon’s alternating musical silences and explosions, was a sensory experience unlike any other in recent memory. Like DollHouse, people loved it or hated it, but nobody was unmoved by it.

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago gave another standout set of performances on their retrun to Spoleto for its final weekend, with a program that included a two-month-old trance-like work called “Gnawa” set to ethereal Middle-Eastern music, a dark, postmodern piece called “Enemy in the Figure,” and the company’s signature “Rooster,” set to a compilation of early Rolling Stones tunes.

Musically, the festival knocked one out of the park with this year’s Festival Concert. Beginning with a brief but remarkably engaging premiere of a work called Storm and Stress by Music in Time director John Kennedy, followed by a rousing performance by the Spoleto Festival Orchestra and pianist Andrew von Oeyen of Rachmaninoff’s infamous “knuckle buster,” the Piano Concerto No. 3. For the concert’s finale, music director and conductor Emmanuel Villaume pulled out all the stops for a thunderous Rite of Spring that had audience members jumping up and down, screaming, and cheering for the ovation.

Charles Wadsworth joked during the first of this year’s Chamber Music concerts about whether he was an “icon” or a “legend,” and truth be told Spoleto audiences don’t seem to want to have to choose between the two. Wadsworth’s popular series at the Dock Street Theatre brought back the St. Lawrence String Quartet, longtime collaborator Paula Robison, clarinetist Todd Palmer, cellist Andres Diaz, pianist Wendy Chen, violinist Chee-Yun, and introduced several newcomers, including lutenist Frederic Hand and passionate cellist Alisa Weilerstein. With their 29th series, Wadsworth continued to demostrate why the resurgence in popularity of chamber music can be attributed in large part to his efforts here and elsewhere.

John Kennedy’s four Music in Time concerts this year went for broke in the theatricality department. The first featured Kennedy tearing off a white sheet from a figure standing in a corner of the stage to expose a female mannequin, and 15 musicians playing hand-cranked music boxes. The third and fourth programs were given over to New York-based percussion ensemble So Percussion, who performed Iannis Xenakis’ monumental four-part work Pléïades in the Gaillard Exhibition Hall and a pair of new, maniacal percussion works by Annie Gosfield and David Lang. The fourth and final concert saw Kennedy himself, clad only in black cycling shorts, slapping, rubbing, and pounding his own body and the floor in Vinko Globokar’s curious performance art piece ?Corporel. We also found SFO trombonist Steven Parker in clown makeup, performing Luciano Berio’s solo work Sequenza V, and flutist Margaret Lancaster (who also appeared as the maid Helene in Mabou Mines DollHouse) performing a trio of theatrical flute solo works to an electronic loop of flute and conversation samples.

Spoleto’s Wachovia Jazz series took a hit early on when headliner Shirley Horne bowed out at the last minute due to a health emergency. (When your sub is Dianna Reeves, though, you know you’re not doing too bad.) The heavy rain that marked the festival’s first week and a half forced nearly all the Cistern’s jazz concerts indoors, up the street at the Gaillard, but they seemed no less well attended for it. (Jazz seems to have become one of this festival’s most popular series, particularly for the outdoors concerts. It’s hard to believe now that one of the reasons Menotti left in the early ‘90s was his absolute refusal to allow jazz into the festival program.)

Though Spoleto grabbed the bulk of the headlines, with its spectacle-heavy program and daily DollHouse alterations and accusations, the City-produced Piccolo Spoleto festival — with its hundreds of theatre, music, dance, film, literature, and visual arts offerings — provided a huge slate of performances and exhibits for festival goers, often at far less cost and with a decidedly more populist bent to them.

I’d love to have the space to talk about the many Piccolo events I attended, and the great way the outreach festival fills in the gaps in Spoleto’s more hard-hitting schedule. I’d love to be able to talk about critical and audience reaction to all of the performances — even just about the several music and theatre series — but I don’t have the luxury of that kind of time. All I can do is send a huge shout-out to the many performing artists and companies, from Charleston and from away, and the dozens of program coordinators who work with Ellen Dressler Moryl and the Office of Cultural Affairs who made this year’s Piccolo Spoleto a success, in spite of the rain, in spite of our inability to send a reviewer to every Piccolo event, in spite of our mixing up the photos for Lilia! and Lilita. Congrats to all of you. It’s Piccolo that truly brings Menotti’s and Redden’s vision for the festival to life.

Three years ago, when I first took on the challenge of acting as Spoleto overview critic for the City Paper, the role was a very different one. I attended as many events as I could and, each Monday, I’d write up a lengthy overview of what I’d seen and experienced during the previous week for that Wednesday’s issue of the paper. Last year, for the 28th festival, I decided to keep a daily weblog of my experiences, rather than waiting until the end of the week to begin rifling through my notes. Blogging technology was still somewhat user-unfriendly a year ago, though, and few people even knew what a blog was.

This year, that situation was quite different. Not only was I able to post hourly and daily updates to the Spoleto Buzz Blog easily (and with photos), but The Post and Courier introduced its own daily blog, hosted by staff writer Dan Conover. Dan linked regularly to posts I made on my site, and I did the same at the Spoleto Buzz Blog. Taken together, I think the two online journals provide as comprehensive a narrative as can be found for the 29th Spoleto Festival in Charleston.

I look forward to reporting on the Festival again in similar fashion next year, and watching how it and Piccolo take over the city, turning it for a short time into a carnival, a stage, an exhibition, a party, an open-air market, a pageant, and a celebration of ourselves, creating in the process a shared sense of community like no other place in the world. The change is temporary, but the effect it has on our lives last forever.

Three weeks ago, Charleston was a different place.

It’s nearly over. Only today’s finale remains yet to be experienced, and I’m feeling exhausted, relieved, and more than a little sad. Over at Dan Conover’s Spoletoblog, he reports that Blair Tindall writes in today’s Post and Courier, in a festival retrospective, that she attended 37 events over the course of Spoleto’s 17 days. That’s particularly impressive in light of the fact that Tindall’s never tackled this job before. Following in Robert Jones footsteps would have been a difficult task for anyone; when I spoke with Tindall in the Spoleto press room at one point mid-festival, she mentioned that the process had been one big learning curve for her, and she was still feeling her way into the best process for managing her time. My hat’s off to her for taking on the challenge at all. My feeling is she did as good a job as anyone could have asked for.

My own count on events attended is somewhere between 59-64; I’ve tried to go back and recall every single performance and festival-related event I made it to, but several of them were spontaneous decisions not on my schedule, and others I only ducked into to get a feel for what was happening before I cut and hightailed it to something else. Still others were events that were of neither Piccolo nor Spoleto: the Domain magazine launch party, for example, and my own performance and work in the A Perfect Ten short play showcase last Thursday night.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to write here about everything I saw or experienced, much as I wanted to. This often happened when I saw four more more events in a single day; finding the time to write (often in the Spoleto press room at the Gaillard or in Port City Java at King and Calhoun, both boasting wireless internet signals) was sometimes too difficult between shows. By the time I’d caught up, it was often a day or two later and I had other things to cover, if this blog was to remain timely. (A perfect example: last Friday night I saw Heather Grayson’s Solo Turn production After the Storm, the last in Spoleto’s three-part series. Had much to say about it, but it was over at 10:30 pm, and I had some drinks with friends afterward. The next day, I wrote about three of the events I’d been to on Friday but didn’t get to writing about that one before it was time to see the Japanese dance troupe Miyagi Ryu Nosho Kai at the Gibbes Museum at 2 pm. From there, it was to the Piccolo Finale, and, later, to Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and the Spoleto Soiree. Which brings us to this point.)

In any event, I’ll spend the rest of this afternoon and probably a good deal of Monday morning putting together my own festival retrospective for next Wednesday’s City Paper. Until then, thanks for reading, and see you at the finale.

I had to leave Grace Church, Mozart, Villaume, and John Kennedy early, though, since I wanted to be at another church, the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, for the 6pm start of Piccolo Spoleto’s tribute to Robert T. Jones. Bob was the Post and Courier’s Spoleto overview critic from the festival’s earliest days, traveling to Charleston each year from New York City to do the job Blair Tindall is doing this year. In the early 90s, he and his longtime partner Jorge retired in Charleston, and he began writing a bi-weekly column on the arts in Charleston for the P&C in addition to his Spoleto coverage. During that time, while I was the editor of Charleston Magazine, I became friends with Bob when I hired him to write a retrospective feature for the magazine on his (at that time) nearly 20 years covering the Spoleto Festival for the P&C. Bob certainly had some stories to tell about the festival: seeing artists like Renee Fleming, Yo Yo Ma, Bobby McFerrin and many others play there for the first time, before they were household names, and other tales, not all of them fit for print in a family paper. It’s very likely that Bob saw more of the Spoleto Festival than any other human being, living or dead. He had a sharp wit and an equally sharp pen, and he was a good friend. So it was important to me to be at the Tribute Concert Ellen Dressler Moryl had scheduled as part of Piccolo’s Spotlight Concert Series.

Moryl gave a few brief remarks, then ceded the floor to longtime Post and Courier writer Carol Furtwangler, one of Bob’s best friends. Carol spoke eloquently about her friendship with Bob, ending with her hope that he “awaits us in whatever dimension music eternally plays.”

Afterward, members of the Chamber Music Society of Charleston performed beautiful renditions of Samuel Barber’s timeless Adagio for Strings, Philip Glass’ String Quartet No. 2 (a favorite of mine), a suite for wind sextet from Leos Janacek, and Hector Villa-Lobos’s Last Distribution of Flowers for flute and guitar. It was a touching farewell, one of many gestures Piccolo and Spoleto adminstrators have made this year to acknowledge Bob’s too-early death and his enormous contribution to Charleston and the two festivals.

Taken together, the two afternoon concerts also highlighted the importance of local churches to Piccolo and Spoleto. When you can’t get an expensive new symphony hall built, you gotta use what you’ve got. And churches certainly have the acoustics for classical music. Just don’t expect to sit comfortably in them for long.

Here what it looked like yesterday at Grace Church (left) and the Cathedral (right).

Later Friday afternoon, I dropped by the last of Spoleto’s Intermezzi concerts at Grace Episcopal Church, where Emmanuel Villaume and the Spoleto Festival Orchestra were performing an all-Mozart program: his popular Concerto No. 2 for Flute and Orchestra and the Symphony No. 40, one of his most well known.

(Side note: last Tuesday, I stopped by the Charleston County Main Library downtown in the early afternoon to catch a few minutes of their American Film Series, which on that day featured Milos Foreman’s wonderful Amadeus. With two of Mozart’s operas in this year’s festival (Don Giovanni in Spoleto and The Abduction from the Seraglio in Piccolo), plus a host of other presentations in the two festivals, including Friday’s Intermezzi concert, it was interesting to watch once again Peter Shaffer’s fantastic film about one of the world’s greatest creative geniuses. Plus F. Murray Abraham and Tom Hulce are brilliant as Salieri and Mozart.)

Music in Time director John Kennedy came in a little late and joined me in the back of the church where I was standing. “I hate the seats in here,” he confided. “I’d rather stand in the back than sit.” Given that Mozart’s 40th Symphony is one of only two he wrote in a minor key (G minor) — and that because he was heavily influenced by the Sturm und Drang (”Storm and Stress”) movement prevailing in Germany and Austria at the time, it occurred to me afterward that Kennedy may also have been checking out the historical precendents for his own new work, entitled Storm and Stress, which opened the Festival Concert last Sunday. Didn’t have the chance to ask him, but he did apologize for not making it to A Perfect Ten the previous evening. Which I thought was awfully nice of him.

On Friday at 2pm, I went to St. Johannes Lutheran Church on Anson Street to see a special event: the Celtic fiddle ensemble Na Fidleiri, comprised of 25 fiddles, guitars, banjos, mandolins, assorted other Celtic instrumentation and singer, all directed by Mary Scott Taylor — wife of the very talented Robert Taylor, who himself is director of the CofC Concert Choir, the Madrigal Singers, and is CSO Choral Director. I imagined that the concert was part of Piccolo’s Folk & Fret Series, which is why I was at St. Johannes Lutheran Church. When I arrived on Anson Street at 1:59pm, though, and saw all the available parking in front of the church, it became clear I’d imagined wrong.

Silly Spoletian, I thought to myself. This event is at Charleston Music Hall, not St. Johannes Lutheran Church.

As it turns out, Na Fidleiri was in fact performing at the Circular Congregational Church yesterday, not at either of the other two locations. At Charleston Music Hall, though, I found the Lovell Sisters on the stage, so I decided to make do with what I had in front of me. I’d like to have seen Na Fidleiri, but poor organizational skills, the hassle of parking, and a brain cloudy from two weeks of non-stop festival-going had brought me to Charleston Music Hall, so I decided to go with the current rather than bucking it.

It was a happy mistake, it turns out. I’d planned to catch the Lovell Sisters’ fusion of bluegrass, folk, country and contemporary acoustic music at noon on Saturday, but Friday worked just fine for me, seeing as how I was already there. I hope Sheri Grace Wenger is pleased with the turnout for her programming at the Music Hall, which also includes Quintango Cabaret, Blue Plantation, John Brannen, and the music theatre events A Chorus Line, The Rock and Roll Heaven Show (big shout-out to my lovely friend Tiffany Coleman in that one), Unforgettable, and Always … Patsy Cline. There was a huge crowd at the Friday matinee concert, which suggests she’s doing pretty well. Hope so.

The Lovell Sisters consist of 14-year-old Rebecca on mandolin, 15-year-old Megan on Dobro, and 19-year-old pre-med student Jessica on violin, with all of them also on vocals. They’re backed up by Joshua Miller on guitar and banjo, and Jess Holloway on bass. The five of them made great, toe-tapping music, and the three girls performed (and worked the audience) in a manner well beyond their years. If Jessica becomes a doctor, she’ll have missed her calling. The three girls and Joshua chatted with audience members (mostly the young girls) and signed autographs in the lobby afterward. When Jessica said, “Thanks for coming, really,” she looked right into the eyes of the person she was talking to and you could see she meant it.

So what gives with the weather? I’m getting conflicting accounts of what we can expect for Sunday’s Finale at Middleton Place. Last year we got thoroughly rained out — even the F&B crowd, who were boozing it up right next to the City Paper spread (which was pimp, by the way), eventually threw in a very wet towl and said to hell with it. And you know that crowd doesn’t go down without a hard fight. And even the year before that was damp, if not completely wet. So we really, really deserve a nice day for Sunday’s festivities. We need the Piccolo stage to be dry so that Paul Scheer and Paul McBrayer can get up there and amuse all hell out of us. We need to be able to romance our girlfriends, boyfriends, and spouses with walks around sunny Middleton Place grounds. We need to be able to amble from picnic to picnic greeting friends and sampling food & drink without slogging through a muddy marsh of a Greensward. And we need to be able to hear the Spoleto Festival Orchestra perform its Prokofiev, its Shostakovitch, its Newman, and its, um, Newman unhindered by falling water of any kind. And most of all we need to see those badass fireworks. But weather.com is calling for a high of 85 and isolated thunderstorms, while over at the Post and Courier, Dave Munday says Arlene, the first named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season (did I not see this coming?) might bring yet more rain to Charleston late Saturday. Is there an anti-rain dance?!

Not that he’s part of either festival, but Ryan Adams’ presence in Charleston for a concert at the NCPAC does happen to coincide with the closing weekend of both Piccolo and Spoleto, so I figure Parker Posey’s former boyfriend is fair game for blog coverage. Also, the fact that he called our offices today to complain about a preview article we ran about him in this week’s paper sort of helps me rationalize it. Adams, who’s touring in support of his new album, Cold Roses, apparently hit the King Street mile pretty hard last night, keeping the rock star stereotype alive at Cumberlands, the Kickin’ Chicken, and the Upper Deck, among other downtown watering holes. Not 30 minutes ago he was on 96Wave, singing a song he wrote today about the Upper Deck. Staffer Sara Miller sez two friends of hers were at the Deck last night when he was there, and later left with him to continue the party at his hotel room, playing guiter with him until the wee hours of the am. Maybe he’ll be out and about again tonight after his concert. Let us know if you see him. Especially if he’s misbehaving.

Well, thank god that’s over.

Last night’s two back-to-back productions of our collaborative short play showcase at PURE Theatre, A Perfect Ten, was fun and all, but I must have been insane to schedule it for the middle of Spoleto’s second week. What was I thinking? If you noticed that my daily blogging updates have dipped in recent days, it’s because I was acting in a short play written and directed by PURE ensemble member David Mandel called “Type Against Type,” as well as directing my own short play, “Eight Grand,” which involves a menacing Mexican immigrant, a loquatious loan shark, a hapless poker player, an Xbox, a partly paid-off Chevy Tahoe, a semi truck with a false bottom, date rape drugs, and a pizza. (If I can figure out how to post a PDF of the script here, I will.)

Spoletoblog’s Dan Conover came by the 9pm show, which was very cool of him, and he writes about it on today’s blog. Like Dan, I’d love to see us put together some more of these types of things at PURE’s excellent little black box theatre (in the Cigar Factory at East Bay and Columbus) in the future. But not necessarily during the middle of Spoleto again.

If you haven’t yet been to see a play at PURE Theatre, you don’t know what you’re missing Every local theatre company has its strengths; PURE’s lies in great acting, a versatile, intimate space, and cutting-edge, contemporary scripts that are both entertaining and provocative. They’ll be producing David Mamet’s classic play about small-time crookery, American Buffalo, this July. Mark your calendars, because you want to catch it. Trust me.

Here’s a photo of PURE ensemble members R.W. “Smitty” Smith and David Mandel rehearsing “Eight Grand” before last night’s performance. These guys rock.